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Office Disinfection: How To Prepare

Keeping your office clean, safe and healthy is important at any time, but during the COVID-19 pandemic it is crucial. Professional commercial cleaning staff can properly clean and disinfect your workplace, but they need to be able to work in an uncluttered environment to produce optimal sanitary results. This means desktops and work areas must be cleared of papers and objects prior to cleaning, so that all areas can be accessed for full-scale, professional sanitization.

The high-touch objects and surfaces in your office that require focussed cleaning and disinfecting are the ones that employees and visitors touch and handle most often and therefore collect the most germs and pathogens.

Encourage employees to leave their tech in the office, including computers, laptops, mice and keyboards

If employees cannot leave their work cell phones in the office overnight for disinfection, ensure they wipe down their phones often with a disinfectant safe for usage on cell phones.

Why is disinfection of cell phones so important? One study reports that, on average, we touch our cell phones 2,000 times a day. Other recent studies have shown that adults touch their nose, mouth or eyes approximately 16 times per hour. Keeping cell phones disinfected can help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace.

To prepare your office for professional cleaning and disinfecting, all high-touch areas including desktops, workstations and chairs need to be cleared of paper and personal object to provide full access for sanitization procedures.

Strategies for preventing the spread of infectious disease in your office

Install no-touch soap dispensers in restrooms.

Emphasize to employees and visitors that washing hands often with soap and water is the best way to avoid transmission of disease.

Increase the availability of disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizers at key locations in the office.

Encourage respiratory etiquette (e.g., coughing into one’s elbow, immediately disposing of used tissues) and hand hygiene by all employees.

Remind employees the importance of staying home if they are sick; send home employees who show symptoms of illness.

As experts in creating clean, safe and healthy environments, ServiceMaster Clean is aligned with Health Canada recommendations and employs preventive commercial cleaning and disinfecting processes and procedures to respond to all types of infectious disease contagions, including COVID-191.

Our locally owned ServiceMaster Clean team can help implement effective preventive cleaning, disinfecting and sanitizing protocols for your office to help prevent outbreak and spread of infectious disease. Please call to let us be of service.

1 Human coronaviruses can remain infectious on inanimate surfaces at room temperature for up to 9 days. At a temperature of 30°C [86°F] or more, the duration of persistence is shorter. Veterinary coronaviruses have been shown to persist even longer for 28 days.

DISCLAIMER - COVID-19 is an emerging pathogen and new information becomes available on a regular basis. The information presented here is based on reports available at the time this article was written, in May 2020, and is derived from several sources including the U.S. Center for Disease Control, World Health Organization, Health Canada and other sources. The information contained in this article may be updated at any point by the organizations mentioned herein. It is the responsibility of every business to stay current on new information regarding COVID-19 as it emerges. This article should not be construed to be the totality of all information available on COVID-19.